June 2023 in Books

Sorry this is late! I read five books in total in June. One fantasy Stardust by Neil Gaiman, two modern classics The Constant Nymph by Margaret Kennedy and The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald, one non-fiction The Genius of Shakespeare by Jonathan Bate and one contemporary novel The Trouble with Goats and Sheep.

Stardust

Stardust is a 1999 fantasy novel by Neil Gaiman. The novel starts with Song. It’s not just any old song, it’s John Donne’s beautiful, Song. The one that starts with “Go, and catch a falling star”.

This is the second fantasy novel I read that makes explicit reference to John Donne’s Song. In the first one, Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones, Song is turned into a riddle and a spell. When all the prophecies in Song are fulfilled, the witch will catch up with Howl and there will be a final showdown. In Stardust, it refers to the fact that the story is about a falling star and Tristran our protagonist sets out on a journey to capture her. Because Song links the two books up, I kept hearing echoes between them as I read Stardust.

A few things stand out.

• First of all, I love the language. I’ll read you the scene where Tristran’s parents first met. Dunstan as a young man wanted to buy a crystal snowdrop from a girl at a stall in the faerie market. But she wouldn’t take his money.

‘I could take the colour of your hair,’ she said, ‘or all of your memories before you were three years of age. I could take the hearing from your left ear – not all of it, just enough that you’d not enjoy music or appreciate the running of a river or the soughing of the wind.’

But of course they settled on a kiss.

• Secondly, the contrast between the innocence and darkness of a fairytale has a striking effect. It started like a harmless story for small children, but suddenly I witnessed quite an explicit sex scene; among the peace and quiet of a nocturnal landscape, there was a small but abrupt swear word; I read some murders of human beings but never have I ever watched a unicorn so horrifically abused and its death so graphically described. It was shocking.
• Thirdly, Tristran and the star travelled for years and years before they went home to their duty. They once nearly went home but decided against it at the doorstep, leaving a note to his mother saying:

Have been unavoidably detained by the world. Expect us when you see us.

I often wish I could say that to duty and real life too.

• Lastly, I really like the ending. It’s kind of a happy ending, but they did not live happily ever after. I can’t say much so to avoid spoiling the end of the story. It makes me think of the price you have to pay for love, how long will love endure when you’re no longer two, and when you’ve been lonely for a thousand years or even more, would you think the price you originally paid for the love of just a lifetime too high?

The Constant Nymph

The Constant Nymph by Margaret Kennedy is one of those curious books that was an instant success when it was first published, and is now almost unheard of. It was first published in 1924. According to my library copy, after its publication in Oct 1924, it was reprinted six times in Dec the same year, January, February, March, April and July the next year. Then a cheaper edition was issued and reprinted seven times in the following two years. It was mentioned in Dorothy L. Sayers’ 1934 detective story The Nine Tailors. One aspiring young writer says,

“I’ll write novels. Best sellers. The sort that everybody goes potty over. Not just bosh ones, but like The Constant Nymph.”

The Constant Nymph became the first novel of a genre called ‘Bohemian’. The story starts with a famous musician Sanger, who’s English but lives and travels in Europe with his large family with seven children, often referred to by people as the Sanger Circus. One of their more long-term residences is a mansion high on a mountain in the Austrian Alps. A lot of musical friends and guests come and stay with the Sanger family, one of whom is a long-time friend, the talented young Lewis Dodd. Because of one unfortunate event, the family breaks up and three of the teenage children are sent to England to live with their uptight cousin and uncle.

It took a few chapters before I could tell who the nymph was. One of the Sanger daughters falls in love with Lewis. But being blind to her affection and loyalty, Lewis marries someone else. The young nymph has to adjust and navigate through the tragic events of being uprooted from her beloved family and home, fitting into a foreign and rigid polite society, suffering in the boarding school, and worst of all, losing her beloved Lewis.

You probably can tell I’m trying very hard not to spoil the story. It’s one of my favourite novels this year so far. I highly recommend it. A couple of things I like about this novel:

• I love the relationship between the siblings. They are teenagers. They are helpless against the unfamiliar society, the bullies in school, and the harsh reality of growing up without the protection of parents, they cling really close to each other like a litter of kittens.

• The Constant Nymph belongs to this category of novels written in 1920s and 30s that have this charming whimsical vibe which is quite unique to that time period. For example, so far I read I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons, and Christmas Pudding by Nancy Mitford. I love their charming ridiculousness.

The Trouble with Goats and Sheep

The Trouble with Goats and Sheep is a 2016 novel set in the famous English summer of 1976. Every person who lived through it will reminisce and boast about summer 1976, if you ever complain it’s too hot today. There’s even a Wikipedia page called 1976 British Isles heat wave. Before I go on, just bear in mind that this is Britain we’re talking about where the summer temperatures are usually about 25 degree Celsius max. In my city, people would strip half naked as soon as the sun is out regardless of the temperature. So you might think ‘what’s all this fuss’ when I tell you the highest temperature of 1976 in Britain was about 36 degree Celsius. But this was unusual for Britain, there was not a drop of rain for 45 days in parts of the country, there was drought, water rationing, reservoirs dried out and people could see the formerly flooded villages below, there was even a Minister for Drought appointed. This is the setting of our novel.

It’s been hot here in the UK in June. I was in Leicester for a weekend and I nearly melted. It turned out to be a very fitting book to read this month. I didn’t need to imagine the heat that’s like background music to every chapter and every sentence in the novel, I could feel first-hand how it beat on my head, burnt my shoulders and confused my mind.

The Avenue is a cul de sac and a close-knit neighbourhood, meaning everyone knows everyone for years and people watch their neighbours through twitchy curtains. A resident on the Avenue Margaret Creasy one day disappeared from her husband and home. Inspired by the vicar, ten-year-old Grace and Tilly decided to go look for God and hopefully, God would bring Mrs Creacy home. We follow Grace and Tilly into each resident’s home in the neighbourhood and learn about various mysteries in people’s life. It read like a family-friendly crime thriller at various points.

What I love most is the children’s perspective of looking at the events and their way of articulating their thoughts and observations. The novel is full of these sorts of delightful moments at the beginning. By the midpoint I started to feel impatient and that the book is unnecessarily long. By the end, I was a bit disappointed. Have I missed something? Has the author explained everything? Maybe the author decided that she would not tie all the loose threads together, or reveal the mystery and just give it an open ending, that’s fine, but why did you lead me to think that you will? It’s like reading Agatha Christie without finding out who’s done it. I felt cheated.

The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. By chance, the narrator Nick Carraway moved next to a mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and got to know the man at his grand parties as well as privately. Through Nick, Gatsby was reunited with his former lover Daisy, who was now married to another man. There are confrontations. There are people killed. This is the most famous novel on this list, but still, I for one hadn’t read it before this month so I won’t tell you how the rest of the story goes.

At the beginning, Gatsby looked like a man who created a fantasy world, glamorous illusions for people, for no apparent reason except the pleasure it gave him and others. But later we found out Gatsby was a man whose life actually was a fantasy, in the sense that it was all made up. He created a self-image and an identity and stuck to it all the way till the end. But the glamorous fantasy had no root or foundation. Love, wealth and the lavish lifestyle came crashing down and there was in the end literally nothing left to show that he ever lived. I wonder in all his wealth and self-delusion, if he was ever happy.

The Genius of Shakespeare

I got the wrong impression that the Genius of Shakespeare by Jonathan Bate is a biography of Shakespeare. This is NOT a biography of Shakespeare. Sorry if I misled anyone.

The book aims at general readers as well as scholars. As a general reader, to be honest, I find it really hard work. It’s at the academic end of the spectrum for a general reader. If Jonathan Bate ever came across my channel, I hope he watches the ones where I talk about Mad about Shakespeare and not this one, because I worry I’ll make him sad by showing how little I get from the book.

The book is in two parts. Part one is called Who is Shakespeare? What is he? Which has five chapters:

1. A Life of Anecdote – This is my favourite chapter, partly because it’s easy to understand, and partly because I love the explanation of the idea of creativity and originality. It’s eye-opening.
2. Shakespeare’s Autobiographical Poems? – mainly about his Sonnets, who is the famous and mysterious Mr W. H in the dedication. I love the author’s conclusion. I have no opinion of my own on this issue, but I’m very happy to be convinced by the author.
3. The Authorship Controversy – I wasn’t particularly doubtful that Shakespeare wrote all the Shakespeare and I have never been asked so far, how could I have such blind faith, but if ever I have the need to lay out the evidence, this chapter covers all the ground.
4. Marlowe’s Ghost – writers and artists are more or less influenced by their predecessors and contemporaries, but I never knew how much Shakespeare’s plays were written in response to Marlowe. The author writes “Shakespeare, I suggest, only became Shakespeare because of the death of Marlowe.”
5. Shakespeare’s Peculiarity – not only Shakespeare was influenced by Marlowe, his writing was also shaped by the fact that he was an actor and he knew theatre well. It talks more about how Shakespeare is not an ‘original genius’ but he is a genius in making the old, new. And in giving us many voices and opinions within one play, he allows us to think and discuss forever and ever. I also learnt for the first time that Tolstoy had a lot of negative things to say about Shakespeare and Jonathan Bate thinks him wrong.

Part two is called the Shakespeare effect, which also includes five chapters: 6) The Original Genius; 7) The National Poet; 8) All the World His Stage; 9) From Character to Icon; 10) The Laws of the Shakespearean Universe.

I won’t give you a summary of each chapter in part two. Partly because I was a bit lost a lot of the time. Partly because I don’t want to make this video too long. It’s fascinating though to learn that Shakespeare is not just literary people’s possession. He was made use of so much politically, throughout history and across the world as a banner to mean what people want him to mean and to say what people want to say in certain times and places.

The author sums the subject of the book up nicely for us in the afterword:

The first question that interested me was ‘where did Shakespeare’s plays come from?’ Or, to put it another way, ‘what made Shakespeare into Shakespeare?’ Among the answers are his education, his reading, his ability to renew old stories in an utterly distinctive way, and the influence of his predecessors in the theatre, most notably Christopher Marlowe. Then the second question was ‘where did Shakespeare’s plays go to?’ Or, to put it another way, ‘what transformed Shakespeare from one among a constellation of admired dramatists into the universally revered Bard of Avon?’ That is the story that I tell, through case studies, in the second half of the book. The process began, I suggest, with a transformation in the idea, the very meaning, of ‘genius’. And then it was the Romantic movement across Europe that played the biggest part in the story.

Reading The Genius of Shakespeare is quite eye-opening. If you’ve read and recommend other non-fiction works about Shakespeare, please share them with me, especially if it’s written for general readers. I’m also loving Modern Classics titles at the moment. I have a few from Persephone I’d like to read after July. If you have any recommendations for early 20th-Century writers and which titles of theirs I should start with, please share with me in a comment too.